Pronouns: They/Them

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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • The system rewards ownership, and owners sometimes are forced to distribute some value back to the creators of value to get that reward. Sometimes owners are forced to or benefit from sharing some ownership (like in the case of IP on YouTube).

    It’s not unique to software, though the potential to infinitely copy software makes the relationship starker. For example owning a parcel of land is similar to owning a peice of IP, in that the creation/purchase potentially happens once, and rent can be extracted over time from everyone who utilizes it. The number of renters you can fit on a peice of software is theoretically infinite, but in practice limited by the number of potential customers, the availability of their attention, and your distribution Infrastructure, while the number of renters you can fit on a parcel of land is limited by its size and the structures on it.

    Note that most owners did not personally create and do not personally develop what they own. Most software is not owned by programmers (who often make good money, but nowhere near the rent that is extracted from that software), and most homes are not owned by builders (who sometimes can’t afford the homes they build). It’s ownership which is primarily rewarded, and which spawns most further ownership.


  • I had a client at a law firm who moved to a different city, but continued to remote into his computer at work. At some point someone moved it to some other spot in the building so they could have someone else use his desk, and he continued to use it without issue.

    Until one day it shut down, while he was in the middle of something very important and lawyery. No one at the firm was willing to look for it (as they were all lawyers), so we had to send a technician on site to just check each room until he spotted an old computer connected to power and Ethernet in the corner of a mail room.

    Some months later it happened again, in a the middle of another important time sensitive lawyer thing. Except now he had two headless computers which he used both of (an old computer and a new one he was migrating to), and he still didn’t know where they were physically. Luckily there was a intern on site to do the search this time, but it took some time to figure out which was which when we did locate them.